Freedom To Choose Schools An Intriguing Idea

November 21, 1985|By William Raspberry, Washington Post Writers Group

WASHINGTON — Residents of low-income, inner-city neighborhoods have a right to be suspicious when a Reagan administration official approaches with, ''Look, kid, I'm going to do you a favor.'' Still, it might be worthwhile to take a second look before dismissing the latest proposal as just another attempt to use the poor to help the rich.

Education Secretary William Bennett is urging federal legislation to ''voucherize'' special school aid for disadvantaged children, allowing them to purchase remedial math and reading help from the public or private schools of their choice.

On the one hand, the proposal is an obvious camel's nose that eventually could lead to the full-scale transformation of public-school expenditures into educational vouchers. There is widespread fear that such a shift would destroy the public schools without any guarantee that the children most in need of improved education would get it.

On the other hand, the proposal does address a real problem. Parochial students with special needs used to be taught by special-education teachers from the public schools on a part-time or after-hours basis.

But the Supreme Court has ruled such use of public school teachers unconstitutional. Under that ruling, parochial students in need of special help must now be walked or bused to neutral sites.

The Bennett plan, which he has been promoting for several months, would transform the approximately $3 billion now spent under the Title 1 program into vouchers worth about $600 for each of the 4.8 million disadvantaged children in the program. As Bennett explains it, the vouchers would be redeemable for educational services, in much the same way that food stamps are redeemable, at schools of the parents' choice -- at least in those school districts that, unlike Washington, have open-enrollment policies.

The objections are obvious: the threat to public schools, constitutional questions, the fear that it constitutes a sneaky approach to public funding of religious schools.

But the proposal also may provide a relatively risk-free and inexpensive way of answering some questions that a lot of us have been worrying about.

For instance, would a few hundred extra dollars tempt the parents of poor children to abandon their neighborhood public schools for distant or non- public classrooms -- the fear that's always raised by voucher or tuition tax-credit proposals? Would the federal regulation accompanying the vouchers lead private-school operators to reject them? (The most carefully written control in the Bennett proposal is designed to prevent racial discrimination.) The most intriguing questions have to do with the practical implications of ''choice.'' Now, all we have are inconsistent guesses. For example, the key argument against a Norfolk-style desegregation arrangement is that it is nothing more than a way to avoid desegregation, because the expectation is that very few children would take advantage of the transfer option. (Under the Norfolk plan, any child can transfer, with transportation provided, from a school in which his race is in the majority to any school in which it is a minority.)

The Bennett plan is opposed (by some of the same people) on the ground that so many children would opt out of their neighborhood schools as to threaten their continued existence.

The fact is, we don't know which would happen. How dangerous would it be to use this limited proposal to find out?